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2014/03/27

Technicolor Skull is Kenneth Anger’s
current collaboration with the musician, film-maker and magician, Brian Butler. They perform as a duo
against a video backdrop of clips taken from Anger’s oeuvre remixed with images
of skulls abstract iconography. Butler plays discordant guitar noise whilst
Anger busies himself with a Theremin. Most performances to date have taken
place in gallery-type contexts, in
support of exhibitions by Butler and / or Anger and they have also just put out
a record. The particularity of this
context and the nature of their output thus far sums up the nature of
Technicolor Skull as a project: an ongoing series of improvised ‘magickal’
performances that carry the resonance and aura of a rock band.

Musically,
Technicolor Skull owes much to the sound of Mick Jagger’s distress signal motif
that adorns Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969). In fact, a significant sample of that piece appears in
their track ‘Invokation’.
The idea of the invocation as a magickal process – that which draws energies in
– works as an index of the group’s apparent modus operandi. Essentially,
Technicolor Skull seems to serve two purposes: it offers an outlet for Anger to
recycle his Magick Lantern films
outside of the standard screening / festival context and it also creates a
bridge between the work of Anger and Butler, a connection that implicitly positions
the latter as something akin to an heir apparent. More skeptically, given Anger’s
previous association with Bobby Beausoleil, one could argue that playing with Butler
allows the 87 year old Anger to stay young (and relevant). Maybe their stage invocation
works to absorb the energy and vitalism of the crowd? Certainly, there’s an
overt utilization of Anger’s iconicity at work here. If Butler is a surrogate
Beausoleil, he’s the figure that Anger could have done with in the mid to late
1960s; a Luciferean character with the right combination of esoteric interests
and business savvy that permits such left-field pursuits as magickal cinema to be efficiently monetized.

Taken as
a performance, Technicolor Skull veers away from Anger’s signature material.
The visuals are of course consistent but the noise register is somewhat at odds
with his pioneering juxtaposition of image and either classical music or
classic rock n roll (best exemplified in Scorpio Rising(1963)). The sound,
image and mood of Technicolor Skull is actually a lot closer to the kind of
material produced by bands who have appropriated Anger’s aesthetic, such as Death in Vegas and Primal
Scream. It is as if, in recapitulating his earlier work in the company of
Butler, Anger is consolidating his currency in contemporary music culture: a
movement of habituation which is the reverse of the trajectory towards margins
and extremes that previously characterised his work.

Aside
from this simulacral element the abrasive quality of the group (redolent of
other noise acts like Skullflower)
is relevant as regards its practical element. That’s to say the sonic ferocity
of Technicolor Skull points to the close intersection that exists between
magick and noise, a link that is arguably integral to Anger’s wider praxis.
This was recently highlighted in Zachary Lazar’s novel Sway (2008), a (loosely) fictionalized account of the biographical intersections between Anger, Manson
and The Rolling Stones. Lazar populates the novel with a series of fictitious
texts that hold the various nuclei together, one of which is the magickal tome The Sephiroth. In this we are told ‘Anger’
reads of the archetypal alignment that connects individuals with their mythical
doubles. The realization of this selfhood is offered as the object of the
magickal work (an essentially Thelemic
concept) and requires the initiate to access a conceptual space in which opposites
are negated:

Male
and female, self and other, reality and dream. At the meeting point of these
opposites was a zone of energy and pain where the spirit of Lucifer burned in
isolation. It was the wild chaos of orgasm, the music of war, the entranced stupor
of hallucination. Only a few could perceive this zone. To penetrate it was to
negate any difference between good and evil, life and death, desire and fear.

Lazar is
essentially describing the thinking that is assumed to have informed Invocation. As Deborah Allison has described, the film refers to a “ritualised
process of self-development” in which the ‘demon brother’ of the title is
indicative of the “higher part of oneself that one must access in order to understand
one’s true will”. That Lazar connects this self-actualization to such
dissolving and affective sonic phenomena as “the music of war” indicates that
extreme noise operates as a potential vehicle for the achievement of the
subject position outlined in The Sephiroth.

A
certain precedent for this method exists within the broad history of mysticism
insofar as the experience of sensory extremes (involving either sensory
extremes or amplification) have frequently been tied to the achievement of
spiritual elevation. Negating one’s sense of self either by opening the mind to
a much wider flow of information or by reducing such activity to a kind of flat-line level seems to be culturally privileged as a method of dialectically
producing the zonal existence Lazar alludes to. Hence, the close oscillation
between noise and silence as seen in texts like Jack Kerouac’s Big Sur (1962) and William Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded (1962-67).

Noise
musicians such as Wolf Eyes and Aaron Dilloway also seem to work in
this direction. Particularly when seen live, their performances deviate from
the cathartic communality of the standard rock gig. There’s no carnivalesque
purging of one’s own energy but a bludgeoning, zombifying negation of the audience into a state of mass.
Similarly, Dilloway’s performances, like those of Prurient move towards the corporeal affectivity of Artaud’s
embodied theatre: a shift into a violent state of glossolalia that departs from the notion of a ‘performance’ in the
sense of a rendition of presentation.

It is
this logic that I see at work in Technicolor Skull. Whilst within the ‘canon’,
so to speak of noise

music, Anger and Butler add little to the sonic fabric of
the discourse, their approach is indicative of the manner in which Anger
channels his work into media that is in synchronicity with his esoteric
paradigm. Whereas Invocation
communicated the chaos of war and conveyed a certain violence in its cutting
style, the emphasis of Technicolor Skull is upon the manifestation of a similar
affectivity via the creation of a primarily sonic discord. The sound matches
the images projected but at the same time, the ‘event’ of the performance
appears to work towards the manifestation of a charged and elevated instant. It
is of course debatable as to the extent to which this transport is achieved.
However the point is, Anger and Butler use the creation of noise as a
supplement (in the sense of a parallel and a replacement) to their more overtly
theatrical rituals (such as Butler’s Babalon Working). It is an approach
that parallels and to some extent clarifies the elision between drone and
ritual in the work of Sunn O))).

In one
sense Anger is an artist who has constantly sought to reinvent himself through
the proximity of his collaborators. However, he is someone whose practice has
also remained remarkably consistent despite its change in contexts. If protean,
the fluidity of his output is indicative of the manner in which the ideas he
deals with are present in the undertow of a variety of different languages.

About Me

Strange Dimensions: A Paranthropology Anthology

Collection of essays edited by Jack Hunter features my essay on William Burroughs, magick and recording technology. Available now.

Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts

Annotated screenplay text with archival dossier, unpublished writings and a series of new essays. Nohzone Archive.

Framework 52: Things Fall Apart.

2 volume set of texts, documents, extracts, photographs and essays covering the life and work of Peter Whitehead. Available now from Wayne State University Press.

Selections from the Nohzone Archive.

Collection of rare photographs and previously unpublished documents covering the production of Peter Whitehead's films between 1965 and 1969. Part of the digital resource collection 'Rock n Roll, Counterculture, Peace and Protest'. Available now from Adam Matthew Digital.

Crash Cinema: Representation in Film

Collection of essays edited by Mark Goodall, Jill Good and Will Godfrey featuring my essay on Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962). Available now from Cambridge Scholar's Press.

Telegraph for Garlic

Collection of essays on Bram Stoker's Dracula edited by Samia Ounoughi that features my essay on Dracula and phonography. Available now from Red Rattle Books.